Charts, maps and infographics

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THE WORLD's ten most expensive cities are all found in Australia, Asia and Western Europe, according to the bi-annual cost of living index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, our corporate sibling. Singapore retains the top spot, while weak inflation and the yen's devaluation have pushed Tokyo and Osaka to 11th and 16th place respectively. Seoul has risen from 50th place five years ago to joint ninth at the end of 2014. Asia is also home to many of the world's cheapest cities: Karachi and Bangalore are the joint cheapest locations among the 133 cities in the survey, and five of the six cheapest cities surveyed are in Pakistan and India.

Political assassinations

LATE on February 27th Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former deputy prime minister, was shot four times in the back just a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, condemned the killing and promised to investigate. The brutality of what looks like a political assassination is shocking (even by the standards of an increasingly autocratic Russia), but such targeted killings have been on the rise since the 1970s, according to a report from the Combating Counter Terrorism Centre, a military think-tank.

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AS THE peninsula this year marks 70 years since its division, South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, is pushing the idea of unification as a “bonanza”. For the North, whose minuscule economy is roughly 40 times smaller than that of the South and is only beginning to show signs of reform, that would certainly be the case. But what of South Korea’s gains? The costs of reunion will be staggering—by conservative estimates about $1 trillion, or three-quarters of annual GDP. Its social-security system would need to provide for 25m Northerners, many of them brutalised and malnourished, and including tens of thousands of prisoners in the North’s gulag.

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EARTH is rapidly becoming a planet of the phones (see our leader and briefing this week). Today two billion phones are in use worldwide, and this number is expected to double by the end of the decade. By then nearly 80% of adults will have a device in their pocket with the processing power that would have passed for a supercomputer not too many years ago. To get an idea how much time people will then spend on their smartphones it helps to look at today’s young people: the chart shows that they report much more use during all times of the day than older generations.

Ebola in graphics

THE first reported case in the Ebola outbreak ravaging west Africa dates back to December 2013, in Guéckédou, a forested area of Guinea near the border with Liberia and Sierra Leone. Travellers took it across the border: by late March, Liberia had reported eight suspected cases and Sierra Leone six. By the end of June 759 people had been infected and 467 people had died from the disease, making this the worst ever Ebola outbreak. The numbers keep climbing. As of February 22nd 2015, 23,729 cases and 9,604 deaths had been reported worldwide, the vast majority of them in these same three countries.

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INFLATION rates around the world have been sinking over the last three years. Pervasive economic weakness in the rich world and a slowdown in Chinese growth drove the initial decline. Lately tumbling oil prices have helped to push inflation into negative territory across much of the euro area. America, Britain and China, where inflation rates have dropped below 1%, may soon join Europe in deflation. Falling prices for things like petrol have been "unambiguously good" for consumers, in the words of Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. But broad and persistent deflation is not a healthy thing for a modern economy.

Stockmarkets

ON FEBRUARY 24th London's FTSE 100 reached an all-time closing high, at 6949.6. As the chart at right shows, however, its performance has been very disappointing relative to other markets in the developed world. America's S&P 500 has risen twice as fast over the last 20 years.

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MEASLES is the greatest vaccine-preventable killer of children in the world today. Nine out of ten people who are not immunised will contract the virus if they share the same living space with an infected person. In 1980 the disease was responsible for 2.6m deaths globally. By 2013, when 84% of children aged 12 months or less received a dose of the vaccine, the death toll had fallen to 145,700.

But worries about a supposed link between the measles-mumps-rubella (or MMR) vaccine and autism, though scientifically discredited, have led to a drop in immunisation rates in the rich world over the last ten years. Unsurprisingly, outbreaks are now rising.

Myanmar in graphics

ON FEBRUARY 12th 1947 General Aung San, the father of independent Burma, signed the Panglong agreement with representatives of the Shan, Chin and Kachin people—three of the largest of the many non-Burman ethnic groups that today make up about two-fifths of Myanmar’s population. The agreement said that an independent Kachin state was “desirable”, and promised “full autonomy in internal administration” to “Frontier Areas”, as today’s ethnic states were then known. Aung San was assassinated just over five months later. Under the 60 years of mostly military rule that followed, the spirit of the Panglong agreement has never been honoured.

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HOLLYWOOD's biggest box-office successes are usually splashy, expensive films packed with slick special effects that appeal to audiences the world over. But these popular spectacles are unlikely to carry off Tinseltown’s highest honour: winners of the Academy Award for best picture tend to deal with serious subjects and have smaller budgets (exceptions such as “Titanic” notwithstanding). The eight nominees for this year’s prize—to be awarded with the usual fanfare on Sunday—include films about the Iraq war, motor neurone disease, Martin Luther King and homosexuality.

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THE oceans are awash with plastic. It is most visible in the huge rotating ocean currents, or gyres, such as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch" off the coast of California where tonnes of debris float in an area the size of Texas. But though there have been studies on how much there is and where it is distributed, until now there have been none on where it is coming from.

A new paper by Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia, published in Science, is the first attempt at doing so.

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EUROSCEPTICISM is rife across the continent. Economic stagnation has bred resentment of immigrants, the single currency and the European project. At elections to the European Parliament last May populist parties saw their vote share jump in most big countries, and their support has only grown since. Last month Greek voters elected Syriza, a party of the hard left, to lead the EU's first explicitly anti-austerity government. Anti-Muslim rallies in Germany have swelled (as have counter-demonstrations) and spread to Sweden. But not all populists are alike. Podemos, a left-wing Spanish party leading in some opinion polls, wants to rewrite the rules of the euro.

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VLADIMIR PUTIN'S designs on Ukraine and other former Soviet states depend on Russia's ability to exert both hard and soft power. Its hard power is considerable. It is one of the three biggest military powers in the world. It has almost 3,000 tanks, many of which have been deployed near the Ukrainian border. By contrast, the entire tank force in European countries now numbers 8,000. Its armed forces number 770,000 active personnel but reservists and paramilitaries add a further 2.5m to that total.

Constituency population changes in Britain

THE first-past-the-post electoral system in Britain is unfair to Liberal Democrats and the method of drawing constituency boundaries is similarly unfair to Conservatives. Both are features of British politics that stop those two parties winning a fair share of seats in the House of Commons. But this might be changing. The Economist has examined an experimental data series produced by the Office for National Statistics, which tracks the population of constituencies in England and Wales. We assigned each seat to the party that won it in 2010 to see how the total population of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat seats has changed.

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GREEK voters want to stay in the euro. They should be able to for at least another four months. Late in the evening on February 20th the finance ministers of the Eurogroup reached an agreement with Greece's government to extend the struggling economy's bail-out, which was scheduled to expire on February 28th. The reported deal, which would release another €7.2 billion in aid to Greece provided the country meets certain (as yet unclear) conditions, may provide some respite to the political and economic crisis touched off a month ago when the Greeks elected a new government determined to change the terms of the country's bail-out agreement with Europe.